This seems like a straightforward question, but it’s proven to be a difficult one to answer. Even visualization researchers don’t have a clear definition.

Is it synonymous with information graphics? Does visualization have to be computer generated? Does data have to be involved, or can it be abstract? The answers vary depending on who you ask.

Visualization is a medium. It’s not just an analysis tool nor just a way to prove a point more clearly through data.

Visualization is like books. There are different writing styles and categories, there are textbooks and there are novels, and they communicate ideas in different ways for varied purposes. And just like authors who use words to communicate, there are rules that you should always follow and others that are guidelines that you can bend and break...

Architects and Planners across the country are harnessing the potential of Big Data to build information-laden city-scale models. By gathering and synthesizing such factors as traffic, energy usage, water flows, and air quality, the urban design field is hoping to layout smarter, more efficient, and more resilient forms of development.

Having already made a huge difference to the landscape of the financial, public health and manufacturing sectors, it looks like we can expect Big Data to keep on trucking, so to speak, and right in to the major infrastructure decisions that drive our city planning.

But does it make sense to plan a city on digital footprints instead of real-time foot fall and the day to day needs of the population? Each of us behaves very differently online to how we live offline, so can turning that data into a streetplan really change the way we live for the better?

Architectural Visualization is a harsh mistress. We are seduced by it, but sometimes it leads us astray. While modeling, rendering, and post-production capabilities are always increasing, the realism that we see in renderings is not always proportionate to our ability to produce it. In other words, some renderings don't even look try to look real anymore; they are often dramatized until they look like science fiction or a romantic painting.

"The heart of our work at the Pew Research Center is data. And data visualizations that tell clear stories about our research — whether it be about American politics or our changing demographics — are just as important as the words we write in a report. So, what makes a successful data visual? We think it should present information clearly and concisely, engage the reader and allow them to explore that information.

This year, the design staff looked back through our 2014 archive, and these graphics stood out as almost universal favorites. These visualizations presented a particular challenge and, for each of them, we talk about the approach we took in presenting the data."

Watch the designer’s films that depict a future in which a virtual layer of data is a continual presence in our lives

For our latest issue we met designer and filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda, who creates films that depict a future in which our everyday lives are densely stuffed with information via a digital overlay, in an effort to spark debates about how technology can and should shape our world.

“Now, everyone has a camera in their phone, and can produce and distribute their own content,” he says. “I was thinking about how that could be applied to architecture, to the creation of space. What if an ordinary person could not only customise their own house, but their own street?"

These new renderings show what New York's skyline will look like in 2018, when many of the city's new tall skyscrapers will be complete.

The images were created by visualisation studio CityRealty to show how Jean Nouvel's proposed 320-metre skyscraper at 53 West 53rd Street – now under construction – will sit amongst the numerous other towers underway along the south-west of Central Park. The images also show 432 Park Avenue by Rafael Viñoly, which will soon become New York's tallest residential tower, as well as Fosters' new tower for 610 Lexington Avenue, the recently completed One World Trade Center by SOM and the first of the 16 towers proposed at Hudsons Yards.

In the age of Big Data, folks are often overwhelmed by the volume of data sources, charts, and graphs thrown at them every day. Enter data visualization – the ability to condense, analyze, and share data that makes an impact. Throughout history, data visualization has been used to document everything from health crises to the effect of colors on mood.

But what exactly does data visualization do and how can you leverage it to grow your business? Are data visualization and infographics the same thing? Read on to learn more, plus discover some fascinating examples.

Although many animals take flight, they don’t do it in exactly the same way. That’s what Eleanor Lutz’ exceptional animated infographic shows us. She’s taken the flight patterns of 5 different species – egyptian fruit bat, dragonfly, Canada goose, hawk moth and hummingbird – and used Youtube videos to give us a look at how their wings move.

“I found slow-motion videos of five flying species, and mapped out specific points on the wings during one wingbeat. I ended up with 15 frames per wingbeat, and I connected every frame using imaginary curves that went through all of the 15 mapped points.”

Life quantification pioneer Nicholas Felton's latest annual report is his most ambitious to date.

For the last nine years, Nicholas Felton--who you may know best for inspiring the Facebook timeline or creating the life-logging app Reporter--has been recording some aspect of almost every moment of his life. And each year, he turns this data into a elegant, printed book that visualizes the year called The Feltron Report...

The Felton report is a beautiful peeping hole into someone's life when they start to quantify themselves. Focussed on fairly benign problem space - conversations during the year - it shows what possibilities, both good and bad, lie within the quantified-self movement which is bound to explode with the availability of Apple watch and others alike.

Of course it brings tremendous opportunities for monitoring someone's life in order to improve it. Whether it is by measuring exercice (as we do today with step trackers) or heart rate or glucose levels in order to improve health or medical diagnosis. In the context of business, organizations can monitor employees in order to minimize injuries or prevent illness and time loss due to sickness.

There is of course the dark side, where all this data, when made available without our consent or knowledge, can be used to track us and restrict our privacy or our rights. This is already happening in the contexte of government surveillance (ie. Edward Snowden http://sco.lt/5k4B29) or internet browsing tracking (ie. data brokers http://sco.lt/79yNZh)

Most maps focus on demographics, geological makeup, and natural phenomena such as temperature and wind. No one focuses on other matters though, such as the alphabetic makeup of states when you sort their names in various ways. Break the names apart and put them back together. Examine the parts to gain a vision of the whole.

The I Quant NY blog mines NYC's massive data clearinghouse to visualize issues facing city dwellers, from education to eating.

Ben Wellington is the man behind I Quant NY, a blog dedicated to telling the stories hidden in New York City’s Open Data Portal, a clearinghouse of more than 1,300 data sets from city agencies. Started by the city government in 2011, the open data initiative’s goal is to facilitate government transparency and increase civic engagement.

The blog itself comes out of a stats course Wellington teaches at Pratt Institute’s graduate program for city and regional planning, where he uses these data sets in coursework. Covering everything from gender divides in Citi Bike usage to finding the farthest point away from a Starbucks in Manhattan, Wellington’s larger mission is to get people thinking critically about the numbers that, if analyzed right, can be the key to understanding New York City.

He spoke to CityLab about his blog, his hope for the open data movement, and some of his favorite data sets.

No one has ever driven by a nuclear cooling tower, nudged their loved one, and paused to bask in the aesthetic moment. Just as no one has ever driven the family to a garbage dump for a photo op. But these are the features of our urban landscapes that delight artist Jenny Odell as she scans Google Satellite View, pasting mundane, sometimes repulsive objects into massive mosaics. Each of her pieces in Satellite Collections consists of single categories—swimming pools, baseball parks, docked cargo ships—snipped over and over again from locations across the world, curated into collages of architectural similarities.

Since Feb 11, 2010, SDO has been watching the sun, taking one picture a second, and collecting data to trace how materials enter into the layers of the corona, the massive aura that surrounds the sun. Paired with audio crafted from 40 days of data from the now-defunct Michelson Doppler Imager, the creators adjusted SDO’s vast collection of solar images to “elicit a calming, soothing and mesmerizing experience,” with each minute of footage taking around 10 hours to complete.

From records of images as binary code, through computer translations of the data into black-and-white pictures, a coloring process that highlights different wavelengths of ultraviolet light, and finally motion graphics and video softwares, bringing the Sun to the Earth was no easy feat—but Solarium was well the effort.

Physical versions of pie and bar charts and a tapestry that represents human voices are attempts by designers to make data more accessible

With life saturated by screen-based information, designers are presenting information in more tangible ways. As part of the V&A’s recent Digital Design Weekend, several projects opted for low-tech ways of representing data.

Among these was Physical Charts, a project by Microsoft Research Cambridge for the Tenison Road community project that set out to encourage civic engagement with locally generated data, such as surveys on traffic and air quality. The result is a mechanical pie chart made from slices of sheet plastic attached to a central motor and bar chart constructed from motorised measuring tapes, both of which animate to display real-time data.

The intention, says project designer David Sweeney, was to create something easily legible, but with a sense of magic and theatre. “We wanted to find a way to communicate data back to the people generating it, but in a digestible way, so they were connected to it,” he says...

Sometimes the best photographs come from simply looking at the world from a different perspective. The five photographers featured have all taken this sentiment to daring heights, abstracting landscapes via a bird's-eye view.

Bar charts are a highly versatile way to visually communicate data. Decidedly straightforward, they can convey the message behind the numbers with impact and meaningful clarity, making complex data easy to understand at a glance.'

In our Data Visualization 101 series, we cover each chart type to help you sharpen your data visualization skills.

Pie charts are one of the oldest and most popular ways to visualize data. This classic chart is the perfect example of the power of data visualization: a simple, easy-to-understand presentation that helps readers instantly identify the parts of a whole. Without further ado, here’s everything you need to know about the pie chart...

The second installment of The Best American Infographics 2014 (public library) has an introduction by master-statistician Nate Silver and fifty-eight examples of stellar information design shedding light on such diverse topics as the history of space exploration, the sleep habits of famous writers, the geography of where gay people stay in the closet, the comparative shapes and sizes of major baseball parks, and the social network of jazz musicians in the 1920s.

Silver, the author of The Signal and the Noise, considers the two factors that make an infographic compelling — providing a window into its creator’s mind and telling a story that “couldn’t be told in any other way.

When did people first start writing about effective ways of visualizing data?

Your answer might go back to the 1980s (Edward Tufte, perhaps) or even further back into the 1960s (Jacques Bertin, maybe). Few people would go back so far as 100 years ago. That’s right: one hundred years ago...

Yet another creation has rolled off the powerhouse infographics assembly line over at Pop Chart Lab, and this time, the indefatigable taxonomizers of alcohols and famous quotes have turned their attention to works of architecture.

The Schematic of Structures organizes what the designers describe as "90 eminent edifices erected and perfected throughout history." Arranged by height, the infographic lines up some of the greatest works envisioned and built by man since prehistory, from the Neolithic Cairn of Barnenez and the Parthenon to more modern creations like London's Gherkin and the Burj Khalifa.

The GSAPP’s Cloud Lab teams up with neurologists and the design institute to track how urban environments can make people relaxed or tense.

This spring, the Cloud Lab at Columbia University and the Van Alen Institute tackled the challenge of assessing and mapping how people respond to their environment as a part of Van Alen’s Elsewhere series on wellness in the city.

Instead of the typical focus groups, however, the researchers tracked brainwaves to gauge the mental activities of nearly 100 volunteers; using electroencephalography-based (EEG) measurements and the GPS tracking app, the research team collected more than 1 gigabyte of data over 200 walking sessions that, in theory, create a snapshot of a day-in-the-life of the neighborhood’s mental states.

Presenting the data in a manner that retained its spatial qualities required the researchers to develop their own software for visualization. At a public follow-up presentation in May, the team presented the simplified data on a 3D map of DUMBO. Areas in cyan indicate places in which participants were in a more meditative and relaxed state, while areas in red indicate places where participants had a more focused or heightened sense of awareness...

A new site called Dadaviz aims to make quality visualizations just as social and discoverable on the web as video or music.

Where do you go on the web if you want to see great data visualizations? With a few exceptions, like Reddit's Data Is Beautiful subforum, there is no one-stop destination for quality data viz on the web.

But Dadaviz aims to change all of that. Aiming to be a portal for the best visualization content on the web, it also want to teach big advertisers to harness the power of data to sell their brands...

Google Maps has now added London to an impressive roster of 3D-mapped cities that also includes Paris, Rome, New York and Los Angeles. By piecing together 45-degree aerial imagery, the Google mapping team has been able to recreate entire cities.

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